On Sunday 10 June 2007 22:50, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> And IMHO there is only a very weak relation between a processor's
> instruction set and its power consumption.
Not direct, but several strong points can arise from using a specific
instruction set (presuming compatibility is one of the reasons you are making
such a choice). The obvious are Thumb(2), the less obvious are the
FPU/SSE/etc stuff. Much of the x86 code that the to-be developer wishes to be
compatible with has been written with the preconception of a fairly powerful
FPU (skype, voice processing, multimedia). Now, you could emulate these (as
do many of the existing low-power x86 solutions, this is not exactly new,
there are older generation x86 chips that need very little power), but it
would be crippling performance. In the end, if you want to keep a comparable
x86 performance without going to a several GHz clock, you would pretty much
end up with a regular x86 processor optimized for consumption, which is what
much of the VIA C series are. They try to be x86 consuming less power, and
not being an ARM competitor which speaks x86, which many expect here.